Chapter Text
Alfred F. Jones, personification of the United States Of America, quite literally never slept. At first glance one would see a man who wears sunglasses, even inside, and is forever yawning and stretching as if fighting the urge to slumber constantly. One would eventually notice a faint glow about the man, barely inperceptible until one looked closer.
Neon tubes ran through his arms instead of veins, making eerie fluorescent patterns under his skin. The sunglasses he sported hid both the shadows under his eyes and the lights that glowed and flickered across them, the reflection of a thousand headlights passing by in the window to the soul. A low rumbling roar echoed behind every word he spoke, a hundred thousand voices overlapping one another, the sound of an army of cars idling, of wind rasping across plains, water tumbling down, down, down onto rocks far below. In winter, the sound of endless footsteps in fresh snow accompany the jingling of merry bells and cheery tunes echoing from countless radios and televisions throughout his domain.
On yet closer inspection, one would notice the strange properties of the so-called man’s hair, as it bowed in waves to an invisible wind, the crackle of ripe wheat and the musty smell of a barn accompanying it. The marks on his chest, which from farther away one would assume were scars and callouses, mirrored the mountain ranges that traversed his territory, each tiny crag and detail in sharp relief against his skin. Dust seemed to always crust his clothes, as if he had spent his day toiling in the dry earth of the midwest. Each inhalation was accompanied by the whistling of wind through the sandstone pillars of a mesa, each exhalation with the faint tang of salt one could only find in the winds blowing off an ocean.
And the man-shaped singularity of what it means to be alive turned and walked away.